Speed Racer, Voltron: It’s Saturday Morning All the Time Now

Ain’t It Cool has a rough account of the screenplay for Speed Racer, which is the next project for the fabulous dancing Wachowski brothers, of Matrix fame. This seems to me sort of like having the catering menu of the next Spider-man flick: the Speed Racer script may be a work of the highest literary sophistication, but if this movie has any hope of not-sucking, it will be because the Wachowskis totally reinvent the way we experience cars driving fast through cinema. Which I have no doubt they’re capable of doing. And I’m sure at some point while they’re doing that, somebody will say something, but I’m not dying to know what it is.

I’m just not convinced that all these cartoon franchises, however beloved, actually have any kind of a beating heart within them. Case in point: Voltron, which according to Variety is currently in the process of being resuscitated. There is just no way you can put this on the big screen without getting the bad kind of laughter. Because however much money you pour into it, at the end of the day you’ve still got a giant robot with robotic lions for hands and feet. And those creepy, oddly full white lips. Shudder.